The underlying idea here seems to be something like "Decouple the workstation physical hardware -- from the VM's that actually do the work". For a business, th

The underlying idea here seems to be something like "Decouple the workstation physical hardware -- from the VM's that actually do the work". For a business, this model looks like this: You buy a physical workstation for every person that needs to have access to the network. You buy a bunch of physical servers too. But, but, each workstation no longer runs its own OS, nor is an island onto itself. Instead, it connects to a VM instance, which runs on one of the servers. In that respect, the workstation is a whole lot like a dumb terminal -- except that it has better graphics... Each server runs multiple VM's, but does not have an infinite capacity. When more VM's are needed, servers are either expanded in terms of capacities, and/or more servers are added... VM's could also be ran in the cloud, that is, locally managed (if the servers are local), or remotely managed (if servers are in the cloud)... Diskspace can similarly be decoupled... that is, no longer does one user use one physical drive, but a virtual one, where the "unused space" (virtual unused space) is actually apportioned out to other users... If I am incorrect about any of these points, please feel free to correct and/or elaborate... (Also, yes, I am aware that VMWare and other virtualization platforms -- might also work similarly...)